The Emergence of Functions in Language

This volume explores the question of why languages - even those spoken in the same geographical area by people who share similar social structures, occupations, and religious beliefs - differ in the meanings expressed by their grammatical systems. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Marielle Butters outline a new methodology to explore these differences, and to discover the motivations behind the emergence of meanings. The motivations that they identify include: the communicative need triggered when the grammatical system inherently produces ambiguities; the principle of functional transparency; the opportunistic emergence of meaning, whereby unoccupied formal niches acquire a new function; metonymic emergence, whereby a property of an existing function receives a formal means of its own, thus creating a new function; and the emergence of functions through language contact. The book offers new analyses of a range of phenomena across different languages, such as benefactives and progressives in English, and point of view of the subject and goal orientation in Chadic languages. It also draws on a wealth of data from other languages including French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and a variety of less familiar Sino-Russian idiolects.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. His main research interests are the foundations of syntax and semantics in cross-linguistic perspective, typological explanations in grammar, grammaticalization, and Chadic and Afroasiastic linguistics. His many books include The Role of Functions in Syntax: A Unified Approach to Language Theory, Description, and Typology (with Erin Shay; Benjamins 2016), and, as co-editor with Erin Shay, The Afroasiastic Languages (CUP 2012). Marielle Butters is a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works on languages in the Tibeto-Burman family, as well as on Sundanese and Chadic languages, particularly in the subfields of language documentation, historical linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Her research interests include negation, evidential systems, and language in post-colonial settings.

- 1: Introduction - 2: Methodology - 3: Forced interpretation: The emergence of the comment clause - 4: Systemic ambiguity as a motivation in the emergence of logophoricity - 5: The emergence of benefactive function in English - 6: The emergence of point-of-view of the subject - 7: The emergence of goal orientation - 8: The principle of functional transparency as a motivation for the emergence of functions - 9: Inherent properties of verbs and nouns and the emergence of the locative function - 10: The emergence of functions through metonymy and language contact: Relationships between propositions - 11: The emergence of complex action as an outcome of the availability of coding means - 12: The emergence of gender and number coding in content questions - 13: The emergence of grammatical relations - 14: The emergence of a functional domain through language contact - 15: Conclusions and implications